Penguins coach Dan Bylsma's plans don't change

Thursday, May 21, 2009
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/

To whatever extent and via whatever method he engineers corrections and adjustments between games of these extended playoffs, Penguins coach Dan Bylsma wouldn't say yesterday whether his worksheet following Game 1 of this week's Hurricanes warning was long or short.

PITTSBURGH - MAY 20: Head Coach Dan Bylsma of the Pittsburgh Penguins conducts practice at the Mellon Arena on May 20, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

Was it longer than the work order necessary to ram a corroded 1987 Volvo through state inspection or was it shorter than the typical list for a Giant Eagle blow through -- milk, bread, fungicide, and a Weekly World News if there's an update on Sarah Palin shooting Bigfoot from her helicopter?

"Standard for our team," the Penguins' coach said on the second day before the second game of the third playoff series. "We can be sharper in certain areas. We see a couple of things where we need to maintain our focus."

I bring this up because the Penguins will have to play better tonight than they did in Game 1, even if they do own a 1-0 lead in the Eastern Conference final. It's not every night, after all, that you're going to get a goal from the forward with the least ice time (Miroslav Satan) anda goal from the defenseman with the least ice time (Philippe Boucher), which is what happened Monday in a 3-2 Penguins victory.

For all the confident predictions about a series in which speed would kill -- it was simply a matter of whom -- the Penguins and Hurricanes rolled through 60 minutes Monday night without ever hitting overdrive. Fortunately for Bylsma's team, Carolina was off the throttle by a seemingly identical degree, as Game 1 looked a lot like a deliberate rumba between teams coming off exhaustively emotional seven-game series.

Perhaps because it was.

"We definitely have to bring our game up a level from Game 1 if we expect to win Game 2," said Penguins defenseman Mark Eaton, who dismantled a number of developing scoring chances for Carolina the other night. "We want to keep 60 minutes of focus. We had some lapses in Game 1 and, this deep in the playoffs, you can't afford that. We've got to be better with our execution with the puck, with our management of the puck."

Carolina lost Game 1 on the road in both prior series, getting whacked, 4-1, at New Jersey and at Boston, but both times, the Hurricanes won Game 2. Carolina goalie Cam Ward, in fact, has never lost a Game 2.

"They're disciplined in their approach," Penguins forward Bill Guerin said after practice yesterday. "Game 2 is going to be tougher. It's going to be a grind."

Styles make fights, the old boxing men used to say, and it's difficult fighting your mirror image, which is what the Penguins are doing against Carolina. It's not impossible that if the general flow seems a step sluggish, it's because the similar styles cannot permit the kind of express-lane traffic so many foresaw for this series.

"They're the best -- of all the teams we've faced -- they're the best at knowing their game and playing their game and doing it over and over and over," Bylsma said. "We know how they play.
We have to be sharper and be ready for it if we're going to have success. They're doing some things along the wall against our forecheck that they're very good at and very aggressive, so we did a couple of drills today on that.

"When you've faced one team for seven games, you tend to think every game is going to play out like those games, but now we see a slightly different type of forecheck or some different areas where the game has changed and we have to do some things to get [our minds] out of that [Washington] series."

There can't be any room for misinterpretation among the Penguins as to the message emanating from the first 100 days of the Bylsma administration. The man's a dictator, but not in his coaching manner. He's a dictator by strategical philosophy, which is simply that nothing is more important, particularly in a playoff series, than playing your way in their end.

More or less constantly.

"For me dictating is the key to be able to continue to win games and have success in a series that's seven games," Bylsma said. "That's a long time against any team, and you need to be able to dictate and take it from one game to the next to be able to have success. Special teams are important, but, when you don't dictate, you get into difficult spots. Our goal is to play 5 on 5, that's when we try to dictate the way the game is played, where it is played, and, if we can do that for 60 minutes, we feel we can tip it in our favor."

Based on how courageously they've played to this point in these playoffs, however, it appears the Hurricanes do not take dictation.

Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com. More articles by this author
First published on May 21, 2009 at 12:00 am